Our Community
Community Science represents a network of leading community development practitioners and scientists in the United States and Europe, with offices in Maryland, Italy and Portugal. Our staff members are knowledgeable and experienced in a wide range of methods for supporting and evaluating community initiatives. Our staff has worked with diverse populations, both geographically and culturally, including African Americans, Asian Americans, Latin Americans, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders in rural and urban environments.
In addition to our staff and a national network of collaborating consultants, we have a core group of senior consultants who are widely recognized for their commitment and comprehensive work in providing research support, technical assistance, training, and grants management support in various substantive areas, including organizational and community capacity building, community organization, health promotion, violence prevention, substance abuse prevention, intergroup relations, cultural diversity and immigrant integration. We also maintain our professional relations through involvement in several professional associations, including the American Evaluation Association, American Public Health Association, Association for Community Organization and Social Administration, National Community Building Network, and Society for Community Research Action.
Principal Associates:
David Chavis, Ph.D., is Principal Associate/CEO of Community Science (formally the Association for the Study and Development of Community). He is internationally recognized for his work in the implementation, support, and evaluation of community initiatives, including a distinguished career award from the American Psychological Association and the Outstanding Evaluation of the Year Award by the American Evaluation Association (AEA) with Kien Lee. The primary topic of his work and scientific publications has been the relationship between community development and the prevention of poverty, violence, substance abuse, illness and other social problems through community capacity building. He has lead the evaluation of placed based comprehensive community initiatives concerning substance abuse and community development at the national and local levels for the White House Office for National Drug Control Policy, US Department of Justice, US Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, National Cancer Institute, Annie E. Casey Foundation, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and several other national and local foundations. He has also designed, managed, and implemented capacity building systems for community change initiatives. Before founding Community Science, David Chavis has been a community organizer, community development corporation executive director, director of large university research and public service center, and tenured university professor. He has been an officer and Board member of AEA and other nonprofit organizations. His current work focuses on the how to integrate innovation into the community change practices in order to have maximum impact at the appropriate scale. RESUME || EMAIL
Paul Florin, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, has been a consultant, researcher, and evaluator on community development, prevention, and community-based human service programs for over 30 years. He has directed several evaluations of state and local support systems for substance abuse prevention and coalition building. He has also assisted federal agencies and foundations in the development of technical assistance and evaluation projects. He has published extensively in scientific journals. RESUME || EMAIL
Scott Hebert, MCP, Principal Associate. Over the past twenty years, Mr. Hebert’s professional work has principally focused on evaluation and knowledge-building efforts. Mr. Hebert has conducted a wide range of evaluations, concentrating particularly on comprehensive community change (CCI), workforce development, and economic development initiatives. For the past six years, for example, he has been one of the key members of the cross-site Evaluation Team for the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Making Connections initiative, which was designed to improve community conditions and results for families and kids in tough neighborhoods. Mr. Hebert also previously directed the national evaluation of the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Jobs Initiative, a ten-year effort to improve the employment and economic outcomes of disadvantaged young adults and families through workforce development system reform. He also served as Project Director and Co-Principal Investigator for the national evaluation of the Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities (EZEC) Program for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In addition to his evaluation work, however, Mr. Hebert has more than a dozen years of experience as a practitioner in the design and implementation of community revitalization programs at the local and state levels. He served as Director of the Massachusetts Small Cities CDBG Program, and as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Housing Operations for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Communities and Development. He also served as the executive director of a regional anti-poverty agency for five years. Building on this practical experience and his extensive knowledge of best practices, Mr. Hebert has provided strategic planning and technical assistance services to a wide range of community initiatives and local and state agencies over the past two decades. He also has co-authored a number of guidebooks and training manuals for federal and state agencies and philanthropies, as well as a wide range of evaluation reports and publications synthesizing the learnings from initiatives. Mr. Hebert has a Master of City Planning degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. RESUME || EMAIL
Kien Lee, Ph.D., Principal Associate, is a co-founder of Community Science and directs, manages and provides research, evaluation, and other types of technical support to national and local community change initiatives. She has directed and implemented evaluations on institutional capacity building, intergroup relations, immigrant integration and cultural competency, as well as led numerous community and organizational assessments. She has worked with community-based organizations to transform research into practical knowledge to inform their change strategies. She has presented at national conferences on evaluating and providing capacity building support to cross-cultural community efforts. She was the recipient, along with David Chavis, of the 2002 Outstanding Evaluation Award from the American Evaluation Association. She is widely published and a sought after speaker in areas including immigration integration and cross-culturally competent evaluation. RESUME || EMAIL
Ricardo Millett, Ph.D., Principal Associate, brings a formidable background to Community Science in providing program evaluation and strategic planning consultant services to foundations and non-profits. He was formerly President of The Woods Fund in Chicago, where he developed and implemented a strategic grantmaking plan for the foundation that served it well in responding to the needs of Chicago least advantaged. Prior to the Woods Fund Dr. Millett was Director of Program Evaluation for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. There, he focused on building greater communication and collaboration between evaluation and program staff to maximize the use of evaluation as an integral part of programming. Before joining the Kellogg Foundation, Dr. Millett served as senior vice president of planning and resource management for the United Way of Massachusetts Bay in Boston. There, he was responsible for planning, allocation, and distribution of organizational resources to meet the needs of greater Boston. RESUME || EMAIL
Senior Associates:
Chris Botsko, MA, Senior Associate has over 15 years of experience supporting and evaluating systems and community change efforts. He has provided support to government agencies, nonprofits, community coalitions, and other entities as they seek to improve systems and supports covering a wide variety of groups including families with children, adolescents, women, rural residents, and veterans and their families. He served as Project Director for technical assistance and later for the evaluation of the State Early Childhood Comprehensive Systems Initiative (ECCS) which provided support to cross-agency, cross-organizational efforts to improve systems covering health, mental health, child care, family support, and parenting education in 49 States and 5 jurisdictions. He has also provided evaluation and support for Virginia Smart Beginnings coalitions which are conducting community-level systems change efforts directed at young children and their families. Mr. Botsko directed a project to assess the sustainability of a Federally-funded initiative to develop an integrated approach to women’s health at academic medical centers and community health centers after Federal funding ended. He developed and carried out a project to build integrated community approaches to serving veterans and their families. Using the lessons learned from his early childhood work, Mr. Botsko helped develop and support coalitions that are carrying out action plans to improve services and supports for veterans and their families. He also conducted an evaluation for a Report to Congress on a community-based health care access and outreach initiative for rural veterans. RESUME || EMAIL
LaKeesha N. Woods, Ph.D., Senior Associate, has extensive experience providing program development, evaluation, and consultation services in clinical and community psychology. Her research has focused on cultural influences on the development and functioning of youth and families of color; and culturally congruent preventive interventions for youth placed at risk. She has provided clinical services to individuals in inpatient, outpatient, in-home, alternative school, and prison settings; and evaluation and consultation services to children and youth, family violence, and prisoner reentry programs. Dr. Woods currently serves as an evaluator on The Colorado Trust’s Equality in Health Initiative, ONDCP’s Drug-Free Communities Support Program, OJJDP’s National Safe Start Demonstration Project, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation Plain Talk Initiative. RESUME || EMAIL
Managing Associates:
Stephan Brown, Ph.D. - Managing Associate. Dr. Brown has extensive training and experience applying a wide range of research methodologies to social problems. His primary interest is in applying systems methodologies to problems of community change and development. Dr. Brown’ has developed an open systems framework for measuring partnership capacity and social learning and that he has used in four case studies of watershed management partnerships in the Pacific Northwest. He has led a workshop exploring how Soft Systems Methodology might facilitate social learning in planning for, and managing, institutional change. He has also worked at the NIAA Alcohol Research Group (Berkeley, CA) on several projects including studies on the risks of AIDs, alcohol consumption, measures of drinking behavior.
Dr. Brown has worked in a variety of cross-cultural contexts, including ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico examining local artisan-tourist interactions and, later, an NSF-funded US-India Research and Education Collaboration workshop in Bangalore, India examining the impact of rapid urbanization on water systems. More recently, Dr. Brown’s research has focused on social problems within the United States. His various program- and program evaluation work on hunger, education, and public health issues in the San Francisco Bay Area, which included numerous site visits, He is the recipient of several grants and awards, including the Maurie C. Clark Fellowship and a Miller Foundation Student Idea Generator Process Grant. RESUME || EMAIL
Amber Golden, Ph.D. - Managing Associate. Dr. Golden's current evaluation work involves providing technical assistance, project management, research and evaluation support. Her evaluation interests include community and systems change, health equity, health disparities, and the theory, methodology, and practice of program evaluation. She also has research experience and interests related to the influence of social support and network influences on holistic health and well-being in youth and adults, adolescent transition to adulthood, and intergenerational communication on values, health, and identity in families Dr. Golden uses qualitative and quantitative research methods in her work and has advanced training in measurement and statistics. Dr. Golden’s training includes participation in the American Evaluation Association Graduate Diversity Internship program and the National Institutes of Health Minority International Research Training Program. She provided technical assistance and evaluation services to Communities in Schools, Inc. of Florida. Dr. Golden has also worked internationally assessing psychosocial and social determinants of stress and chronic disease in various local populations in Harare, Zimbabwe. Her research and evaluation interests are undergirded by her experience as a clinician. She has worked in community based settings to provide mental health therapeutic and psychological testing services to children, adults, and families. RESUME || EMAIL
Julia Lee, Ph.D., Managing Associate, has experience in research, evaluation and health promotion in community settings. She has provided technical support for several health and social science research projects on health disparities, intimate partner violence, and community development. Ms. Lee has also worked extensively with community organizations, coalitions, as well as local schools on program evaluation and evaluation capacity building by providing technical assistance, education, and training on monitoring and evaluation, measurement, data collection, and reporting. She has served as the local evaluator for national and state-wide programs, such as the 21st Century Community Learning Centers and the Strategic Prevention Framework-State Incentive Grant. She currently provides technical and logistical support to research and evaluation projects on health equity, health disparities, and immigration integration. || EMAIL
Associates:
Nyquana Manning, MPH, Associate, has a Masters in Public Health from the University of Sciences in Philadelphia and joins Community Science from the Maryland Dept. of Health and Mental Hygiene where she conducted secondary data analyses of Maryland's medical care programs and data in the Maryland Medicaid Information System. In her spare time, she works as a vision therapist for children in Baltimore. RESUME || EMAIL
Vera S. Miles, MA, Associate, has more than ten years of diverse experience in the mental health field, in both clinical and analytical capacities. On the clinical side, she has conducted clinical assessments, provided crisis intervention counseling, conducted risk assessments and mental health intakes, and provided therapy to adolescents and adults. On the analysis side, she implements evaluation procedures, maintains information management systems, and provides technical support and assistance. She is experienced at collecting and analyzing data for evaluations via surveys, interviews and focus groups, ensuring quality and consistency of data. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from Dowling College, NY, and holds a Master of Arts degree in Psychology from Adelphi University, NY. Her dedicated work in mental health advocacy, crisis intervention and analysis has resulted in positive life outcomes for clients. RESUME || EMAIL
Zachary Miller, MPA, brings diverse experience in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. He joins Community Science from EDJ Associates, Inc. where he worked as a contractor in the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. His prior federal experience includes projects with the Office of Inspector General at Homeland Security and the Office of Minority Health at Health and Human Services. He is a graduate of the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration at The George Washington University, where he studied nonprofit management. Formerly, Zachary worked for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Massachusetts Bay and served as an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer in Alaska. He currently volunteers with Brain Food, a culinary arts program for DC youth. RESUME || EMAIL
Research Assistants:
Andrea Campos Altuner, Research Assistant, Ms. Campos Altuner draws upon her academic, professional, and life experiences in the health and human sciences as well as the multi-cultural and linguistic arenas. She has provided logistical and technical support to the Grant Review Office of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration for incoming applications submitted in response to Requests for Funding Announcements. She has assisted in coordinating the grant review process by reviewing applications for grant programs to determine eligibility and conformance to government guidelines and requirements, through the utilization of survey methodologies to review, interpret, and analyze responses to program grantee questionnaires and communicated with program grantees to provide counsel and clarification of program requirements. Her focus is affecting positive global change through work and collaboration with local, national, and international communities, on projects that address current social and economic issues, especially in emerging Latin American countries, that lead to effective policy. RESUME || EMAIL
Administrative Staff:
David Levy, Chief Operating Officer, manages the organization’s financial, contract administration, human resource management, office operations and business development functions. His career in management began as the Vice-President for Finance and Programming for a Fox company-owned television station, the first Vice-President in the company to manage both departments. As the Vice-President of International Planning at the Discovery Channel, he managed the preparation of the international division's annual five-year strategic business plan coordinating the work of finance personnel in four international offices. He also was responsible for analyzing joint ventures and acquisitions. Prior to coming to Community Science, David was the Budget Director for National Public Radio in Washington, DC. He has an MBA and a M.S. in Television Administration from Boston University. EMAIL
ITALIA NETWORK OFFICE
Martini Associati, located in Lucca, Italia. WEBSITE || EMAIL
PORTUGAL NETWORK OFFICE
Associação Portuguesa para o Estudo e Desenvolvimento Comunitário, located in Lisbon, Portugal. || EMAIL
